
Project Model
Vancouver takes its trees for granted. Every year, hundreds of healthy hardwoods are cut down and sent to landfill, reducing what could be viable regenerative building materials to chips and mulch. Our buildings are instead comprised of timber from clearcuts, reducing healthy forest ecosystems to plantations. An obsession with standardized building components has deprived us of the knowledge of how to use all parts of every tree, creating cycles of material waste unconscionable in light of today’s compounding crises.
Sylvanothèque aims to envision how we might use non-standard hardwood timber in buildings. By expanding our palette of materials, we can design a new tectonic approach to architecture that accounts for the discarded trees of our city streets. The inherent forms of trees invite play while seamlessly interfaces with standard components in a building that reflects the ecological variety of the urban canopy. Contemporary technologies of digital processing, in combination with ancient knowledge of building with trees, enable a new way of working with the complex organic forms available to us. It is through this approach that our most ancient building material can meet the opportunities present in architecture today.